Our story, mission and values

How this started

Rahee Foundation was founded in Toronto in 2024 by a group of people from the Iranian diaspora.

They had two experiences in common. Books they wanted to read did not exist in Persian. And some of the books they had already read in Persian turned out, years later, to have been cut.

The second discovery is the harder one. A banned book announces itself — you know what you are missing. A licensed book does not. It sits on the shelf looking complete.

What we are against

In Iran, a book needs a permit before it can be printed. The manuscript goes to the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance, which can require changes as a condition of the permit. A publisher who wants to stay in business learns to predict those changes and make them in advance.

So the result is not really a list of banned books. It is a body of writing that has quietly come to an agreement with itself about what cannot be said, and a reading public with no way of knowing where the edges are.

Censorship also runs the other way. Whole areas of the world's writing have never reached Persian at all, or reached it in a version cut to obtain a permit. And the people who test the limits — writers, translators, journalists — are prosecuted, which is how a state persuades everyone else to censor themselves for free.

We were founded against that arrangement. Everything below follows from it.

What we do

Translation. We bring books into Persian, complete. Where a Persian translation exists but was cut to obtain a permit, we consider the book untranslated.

Publication. We put out work by Iranian writers, intellectuals and artists that could not be licensed at home. We do not send manuscripts to anyone for review, and we do not ask a writer to soften a passage so that a book becomes easier to distribute.

Advocacy. We argue for freedom of expression in the venues where that right is written down or taken away — international law and policy forums, and the press. Publishing is one of the things we do. The right to publish is the reason we exist.

How we work

• We take no money from any government.
• The translator's name goes on the cover, not in the back matter.
• We do not alter a text to make it easier to license anywhere, including here.
• Where rights allow, we publish the original-language source alongside the Persian so a reader can check us.

Our vision

A world in which anyone can say what they think, information moves without being stopped at a border, and art and culture are made without fear of what follows.

We are not only advocates for freedom of expression. We are an organization that produces the thing censorship is meant to prevent, which is the only argument that cannot be answered.